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Latest Voices
A Painful Decision
I thought it would be easier than it was, but it was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. Ma had been declining mentally and physically for the previous several years. This once-feisty woman–who’d been able to add up her grocery bill to the penny in her head and work seven days a week at a local children’s store while still maintaining an eat-off-the-floor home–had become a shadow of herself. Ma barely ate, rarely wore anything but an old white t-shirt and a pair of torn underwear, and sometimes at night wandered the halls of the apartment building where
Overcoming Fear
At age 90, in the middle of the night, my father took his last breath as my mother slept soundly by his side. For 63 years, every night, my mother and father lay side by side–she always very still, he always snoring. Throughout those years they were apart rarely, neither liking to sleep alone.
After waking to find him dead, she stayed by his side for hours. HIs cold, stiff body did not frighten her. Instead, she found comfort in stroking his ashen face, touching his lifeless hand. What frightened her was the thought of leaving
Mirror
As I drove home after seeing my CT scan, I thought about how I could avoid telling anyone my diagnosis. It would be easy, I figured. I would wait until I had written confirmation of what I had seen. A few days passed, and I was able to maintain the deception–I loved acting, and this was an easy role for me, as protector of my family.
When the radiology report arrived, I felt like I was reading a report about one of my patients: “…suggestive of malignancy,” it said. I kept looking at the name and birthdate–yes, this was my
A Fine Man
Hold Me
Wendy’s hoarse howling startled me. She was usually among the best-behaved, highest functioning residents in our group home for adults with mental challenges. But today I turned to see my colleague, Sandra, struggling to bring Wendy back to her room, while fending off her kicks and bites the whole way. I fought my own fear of getting hurt and ran to help.
What If
“Hold your breath,” the technician states.
Working Without a Net in Kenya
The thirteen-year-old boy sits in a battered ENT exam chair. Henry, my Kenyan colleague, hands me a blurry CT scan. “His neck mass has grown for two years,” Henry says. “We think it is a glomus vagale tumor. Do you agree?”
I hold the scan up to a window. The vascular mass fills the side of the boy’s neck, displacing his carotid artery. “That’s probably right,” I respond. “At home, we would get more studies. We would prepare for bleeding. This kind of surgery can be very dangerous, even fatal.”
The Care Piece
He was in his younger middle years, generally well. Before he had a wife and kids, he had been a competitive cyclist, an Olympic hopeful. He stayed active, ate thoughtfully, took no medications. But in the mornings, first his hands and within months other joints would swell and ache terribly, refusing to move. His primary doc sent him to a rheumatologist because, based on his symptoms, it appeared that an inflammatory process was to blame. The rheumatologist ran tests and then more tests; all were negative, but she agreed–this was rheumatoid arthritis.
He was started on a medication that made
Late-Night Calls
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